BURKARD'S BLOG

20 MAY 03: LET'S ROLL

This afternoon, for the first time in five years, I went bowling. Pick up and drop down a heavy object enough times, and it might qualify as weight training.

I piled up a stack of coupons for free bowling games, by eating Banquet frozen dinners -- but they're only good during the day, Monday through Friday. Since I'm still working an overnight shift and sleeping during the day, I should get doughnuts before or after the game. Then I'd REALLY live the life of Homer Simpson.

I pulled in to Peach Bowl Lanes a bit after 5:00 p.m. - and out of 54 available lanes, only TWO were in use. So it was a perfect time to try my first bowling in years. Hardly anyone was around to stare at me and laugh -- and even better, nobody was smoking.

(The last time I bowled was in Toronto in 1998, at a small center in the basement of a strip mall. I was all alone that afternoon - and it DID feel like the operators needed a TV to watch or something.)

While the game of bowling was free with the coupon, I still had to rent shoes. I'm thrilled to report my size-eights were red on one side, blue on the other and white in back. Those shoes weren't circus-clown looking - in this day and age, they were downright patriotic.

Picking a bowl from the rack behind lane 22, I started throwing with no warm-up at all. If you see me leaning to the left for the next day or two, that's why....

But seriously: I wound up with one strike, two spares -- and only TWO gutter balls, on second shots. Remember when the announcers on "Bowling for Dollars" called it the "channel," because gutter sounded too low-class?

After I bowled a strike in the fifth, a strange thing happened. My shots in the sixth never registered on the computer scoring system. Either bowling centers now have a "free frame" policy I didn't know about, or the computer was absolutely shocked.

My final score was a record high for me in ten-pin bowling - a 106. I could have finished in the 130's, but I missed the six-pin twice and the ten-pin once for easy spares. They set those pins simply TOO close to the gutters.

As I left the lanes feeling satisfied, I saw someone walking up with a bowling bag unlike any I'd ever seen - on wheels. Since when did a bowling center start looking like the airport?

So why is a bowling center so empty on a weekday after school? Even without a coupon, a line of bowling and shoe rental only costs about five dollars. But it seems the only balls many young people want to roll these days are trac-balls, on video games.

I read statistics some years ago showing the Columbus and Montgomery areas have the smallest concentration of bowling lanes in the country. Maybe around here, the only targets people want to aim at are the moving ones they can shoot with guns.